Re: Replacing all disks in a an array as a preventative measure before failing.

[Roger Heflin <rogerheflin@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Feb 9, 2022 at 3:12 AM Red Wil <redwil@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> It started as the subject said:
>  - goal was to replace all 10 disks in a R6
>  - context and perceived constraints
>    - soft raid (no imsm and or ddl containers)
>    - multiple disk partition. partitions across 10 disks formed R6
>    - downtime not an issue
>    - minimize the number of commands
>    - minimize disks stress
>    - reduce the time spent with this process
>    - difficult to add 10 spares at once in the rig
>    - after a reshape/grow from 6 to 10 disks offset of data in raid
>      members was all over the place from cca 10ksect to 200ksect
>
> Approaches/solutions and critique
>  1- add one by one a 'spare' and 'replace' raid member
>   critique:
>   - seem to me long and tedious process
>   - cannot/will not run in parallel
>  2- add all the spares at once and perform 'replace' on members
>   critique
>   - just tedious - lots of cli commands which can be prone to mistakes.
>  next ones assume I have all the 'spares' in the rig
>  3- create new arrays on spares, fresh fs and copy data.
>  4- dd/ddrescue copy each drive to a new one. Advantage can be done one
>  by one or in parallel. less commands in the terminal.
>
> In the end I decided I will use route (3).
>  - flexibility on creation
>  - copy only what I need
>  - old array is a sort of backup
>

When I did mine I did a combination of 3 and 2.  I bought new disks
that were 2x the size of the devices in the original array, and
partitioned those new disks with partition the correct size for the
old array.  I used 2 of new disks to remove 2 disks that were not
behaving, and I used another new disk to replace a 3rd original device
that was behaving just fine.  I used the 3rd device I replaced to add
to the 3 new disk partitions and created a 4 disk raid6 (3 new + 1
old/replaced device) and rearranged a subset of files from the
original array to its own mount point on the new array.